{"id":53973,"date":"2026-04-23T14:47:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=53973"},"modified":"2026-04-23T14:47:04","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:47:04","slug":"interview-heavenly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2026\/04\/23\/interview-heavenly\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW: Heavenly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Alison Wonderland<\/span><\/p>\n

Interview By Robin Sheng<\/span><\/p>\n

On April 13, I spoke with Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey of the indie pop band Heavenly. Formed in Oxford, UK, and known for their catchy and emotionally resonant works in the \u201890s, Heavenly has returned after a decades-long hiatus with a new album, \u201cHighway to Heavenly.\u201d The band is currently on a world tour from February to June, with North American dates starting in mid-April.<\/span><\/p>\n

Robin Sheng (RS):<\/b> My first question is that\u2014 correct me if I’m wrong\u2014 but in past interviews you guys have said that you have preferred the relative creative freedom and relative lack of critic attention that Heavenly got compared to Tallulah Gosh, when you were placed under a spotlight and hyped up as like the new best thing back then. Now that Heavenly is also getting quite a lot of the spotlight from platforms like TikTok and all that, how do y’all feel?<\/span><\/p>\n

Amelia Fletcher (AF):<\/b> That’s a really good question. I guess we’re older now, so we’ve had a chance to work out what it is about ourselves that is good and what things we need to improve at, so it’s less pressured. I think it is also because this time people seem to like us, but in their own right, like individuals have decided to like us, whereas in Tallulah Gosh, it was kind of the music press that decided to like us and then told everybody else to like us. And then some people went with that and absolutely loved us, but lots of other people specifically kind of decided, then, we were a thing to be hated because the press was telling them to like us. So we ended up with lots of people being really horrible about us, completely unnecessarily. Whereas I don’t think anyone would really do that now, because you either like us or you don’t like us, but we are not being thrust down your throat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rob Pursey (RP):<\/b> We can’t tell anymore because there’s no music press left, so there might be men fuming with full of hatred somewhere, but we don’t really know. It is also true that when you’re older, you don’t really care less [sic] what people [think] about you. When you’re young, you pretend you don’t care, but you do care. Whereas now, we genuinely couldn’t cut that.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> I’m really glad to hear that you guys have all these fans who are loving you guys for what you are. Have you guys had any specific, pleasant interactions with fans? You guys have done your UK tour already. Were there any particular fan interaction stories?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP: <\/b>Well, there is one. I immediately think of one thing that happened to me. Normally, people want to talk to Amelia and Cathy, so I’m just one of the people that lurk in the background, but I do talk to people quite a lot, and there was this very young girl who was our gig in London. We managed to do an all-ages show, which is quite difficult\u2026. Anyway, she was probably about 15,\u00a0 so she obviously wasn’t even born last century, let alone able to hear our band. Anyway, she really liked it, and she was hanging around the merch stores in a shy way. Somebody else was looking after the merch store, so I talked to her and asked if she was okay and if she wanted something. She wanted a CD, and I said, \u201cOkay, I’ll get that for you.\u201d Then I asked her – I could sort of tell – I said, \u201cIs this your first ever gig?\u201d And she said, \u201cYes, this is my first ever gig.\u201d And it was very moving, partly because it reminded me of what I was like when I went to my first ever gig a long time ago, and also because she was really nice. So I gave her something\u2014 an extra thing\u2014 a tote bag or something. That obviously meant a lot to her. It was just a tote bag, but it was a significant thing [to her]. I wanted her first gig to be a really good thing, if you know what I mean. That was quite moving. And then she said, \u201cOh, can I give you a hug?\u201d I was like, \u201cI suppose if you are asking, it’s okay.\u201d I was a bit self-conscious because, you know, an oldish man being hugged by a 15 or 16-year-old girl is a weird thing. But it was incredibly sweet. She just was glad that she’d had a good time at her first ever gig. Anyway, that was my answer to your question. It was kind of an amazing experience, really.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I had a few people, just young people wanting to hug me as well, which is really lovely. But another thing that happens these days is sometimes people kind of post on social media that they’re going to a gig, and then they tag you, so you’ve already kind of seen these people that are gonna be at your gig. And so then you kind of recognize them. When you recognize them at the gig, they’re then kind of like, \u201cOh my God, you recognize me.\u201d I really like that aspect of social media. It makes them feel like they’re long-lost friends even though they’re 15. I think another thing that happens on social media [is that] someone literally just posted \u2026on our TikTok a school project that they’d done, which basically was that they’d made an artwork out of the cover of \u201cThe Decline and Fall of Heavenly,\u201d and it looked absolutely amazing. And I’m just incredibly pleased that a) they made it, but b) that they could share it with me, and I could see it and tell them how great it was.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> Yeah, it’s definitely a lot easier to connect with people in the age of social media when it comes to these sort of band-fan interactions for sure. I want to move on, perhaps a little bit towards your new album. So this is your longest album in your discography by duration. Was there any particular feeling or pressure to put more material onto an album that marks your reunion as a band after a long hiatus, or did it just naturally come to be?<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Well, there’s 11 songs, which is more songs, but they’re also quite long songs, and I actually think that was unintentional. And when we realized we’d made long songs, I was a bit horrified because I really like short songs, but I mean, they seem the right length. But in general, you know, we’re playing in Boston with a band called Jeanines, and I don’t think they’ve got any songs over three minutes.\u00a0 Most of them are really short. I love that. It was maybe something of a mistake, but hopefully people will bear with the length of the songs. And [as for the] 11 songs, we were aiming at 10. We thought we better have 11 so that there was one spare in case one was bad, and then we liked them all, so they all ended up on there.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> That’s really cool. In an interview I read from you guys back in the \u201890s, you said that y’all tend to take a long while to write a song. For how long was \u201cHighway to Heavenly\u201d in the works?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> 30 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> 30 years is his answer, but that’s completely false. It took 30 years for us to get back together, but [making the album] was [a] couple of years, I guess, or maybe a little less than that. Effectively, we started playing together, but [at first] we were just gonna do old songs and just not do it for long. And then we thought, well, actually, we’re really enjoying this, and maybe we should actually make new material. So, I guess maybe, maybe a year and a half, something like that. Not fast, but not that slow either.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> Do you think that this particular process of writing this album differed in any significant way from how you used to do albums?<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Not that much, actually.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> I think that the normal pattern was that Amelia would sit and write, come up with a tune, and maybe a few lyrics or some words that fit. And then at that quite early stage, it’s handed over to the band\u2014 me and Pete and Cathy and Ian. And we just play it, and we kind of find out there what it should feel like. The melody stays there, the melody is always there. That’s the starting point. But the chords might change around it. The rhythm will probably change quite a lot. I think maybe one of the reasons the songs are longer is that maybe we’d missed that part of the process, you know? So when you get five people in a room, and you start playing, I mean, we’re never gonna be the sort of band that has long solos. I think we just felt we could sustain some songs for longer than we might have done in the past. We were more impatient when we were younger, so like, \u201cOh God, it’s two minutes long, let\u2019s just stop, God.\u201d Whereas now, we think we kind of can probably sustain three or even four minutes without people leaving. I guess we’ll find out next week if that’s true. People might go, \u201cOh God, this song’s been going on for three and a half minutes, I\u2019m going to the bar.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I found writing lyrics possibly even harder this time, but I always found it really, really hard. I come up with tunes quite quickly, and if I was just writing tunes, I’d probably write songs quite fast, but then the lyrics take a while.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b>\u00a0 I mean, they’re good lyrics, so it definitely paid off.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> I think one thing, I mean, you [Fletcher] may disagree because I don’t write the songs in Heavenly, but I write the songs in Swansea Sound, the other band that is playing.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> [They\u2019re] also supporting us.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> You\u2019re always at risk of being self-conscious. And I think that’s particularly true with Heavenly because everybody knows what Heavenly songs sound like because [there have] been lots and people love them. I think there is a kind of risk of trying to second-guess what other people might think a Heavenly song should be like. You have to get over that and just do what you think is right.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I guess the thing that was difficult this time was just that there are high expectations, like we were talking about at the start. And it wasn’t that anyone put those expectations on us this time, but they were clearly there, and I was nervous of making an album that everybody went, \u201cOh yeah, well their old albums were good, but this one’s not very good.\u201d So, I guess we did put quite a lot of effort into the album, but I was alert to also thinking about, \u201cWhat is a Heavenly song,\u201d because we’ve been in other bands and they all got kind of slightly different feels. So I was trying to rethink what is a Heavenly song, and hopefully they don’t sound like a kind of cliched \u201cHere’s another Heavenly song.\u201d But equally, hopefully, they’ve got something in them that makes them a Heavenly song. That is quite a lot just of what comes out of the creative process between the five of us, but also even when at the very early stage of writing them, I guess I was thinking, \u201cIs this the kind of song that I could imagine Heavenly making?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RS<\/b>: As you were speaking [about] how you did want to add some new flairs into the songs, are there any particular sonic influences for this new album? I feel like songs like \u201cPress Return\u201d have a sort of outwardly urgent energy that I don’t find super common in your discography.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> I think one thing I do remember is that Pete, who plays guitar, was keen to have a song that went [Pursey hums a melody here]. I don’t know why, and then we ended up with three of them, \u201cPress Return\u201d, \u201cScene Stealing\u201d, and in its latter parts, \u201cA Different Beat.\u201d They\u2019ve all got a sort of an inverted common disco rhythm, which isn’t something we did in the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> We did [it] a little bit, there was \u201cNous ne sommes pas des anges\u201d, which was a French cover version on the final Heavenly album. [It] was a bit more of that kind of dance-y thing. I don\u2019t know who we’ve been influenced by, but in terms of musical progression, there is more of that sort of thing on the album. In terms of the aggression, actually, I think it was interesting because there weren’t words [at first], and then [came the] words, and then the words influence the music. So that song is actually quite an angry song. And at some point, when the words became more angry, it drove how the song sounded. I’m glad that that comes over.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> In terms of production, I feel that the new album also sounds a bit more maximalist in approach. Was that an intentional choice? How did the production process specifically pan out for this album?<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Do you mean there’s even more keyboards and backing vocals?<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> Sort of? That, and also just the general dynamic choices perhaps?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b>\u00a0 Yeah, we went to a studio, [and] this guy called Toby Burroughs produced it. He produced other stuff that we liked, including an LP by Sassyhiya, who are on our label. We said we wanted to get another perspective because the trouble with Heavenly is that Heavenly is quite a loquacious group of people, and if we tried to do it ourselves, we’d just talk about it for weeks and probably never finish it, so having somebody else doing it was good. And I think Toby, for one, is very good at keyboards, so he was able to help Cathy choose some really interesting sounds over and above what comes for free in her keyboard, so that was one thing that was quite important. And I [felt the keyboard sounds] were quite big and so they should get quite a big production if you like. We’re obviously very used to lo-fi stuff, and the old Heavenly albums were, well for one, done a long time ago when studios were kind of more basic, and b) they were done in a real hurry because there wasn’t much money around and not much time either. So, the old albums, maybe apart from the fourth one, were just us going into a studio, playing the songs as quickly as we could, and getting out of there.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Even the fourth one.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Yeah, we were able to spend more time on this than we did in the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I think that’s right. I think also Cathy has, in particular, got more confident with her keyboard playing and her backing vocals, so she put on a lot, a lot of stuff. There was a few things where we were kind of going, \u201cReally, really? Do we really need all those things?\u201d But actually, in retrospect, they’re brilliant. They’re really, really good.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> But I mean, that was part of the initial process, though. When you do it after a long time, you’re more objective, and you think, \u201cRight, this band is a band with two vocalists.\u201d So as soon as we started playing the songs together, Cathy was in there trying things out, and we probably all knew we should make the space for that to happen rather than it just being backing vocals. So, I think her vocals and her keyboards are part of what gives it that kind of bigger feeling.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I shouldn’t even really refer to them as backing vocals. She takes the lead quite a bit.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Yeah, it’s another vocal.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> I’m really glad to hear that. You also have your own label now. When you’re looking to sign bands into Skep Wax, do you look for ones that you feel carry or sound or your legacy in some sort of way?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Not consciously. In fact, one of the most recent bands we put out, a band called Tulpa, I don’t think they’ve even really heard of Heavenly.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> They have now, but they hadn’t.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> They hadn’t. So no, and in fact, it’d be a bit embarrassing if the entry was only permitted if you could name Heavenly LPs. So no, we don’t. Also, there’s a real range of ages of bands on the local [scene], from The Cords\u2014 Eva’s still only 17\u2014 up to us and Railcard, who are all much, much older, and so people’s reference points are very different. [For] Tulpa, who are probably [in their] late twenties, early thirties, it [our sound] wasn’t part of theirs. I think they were aware of it, but they weren’t trying to sound like us, and they don’t sound like us. You\u2019ve probably noticed that nearly all the bands on the label are fronted by, or have got quite a significant non-male presence. So we are more interested in that than whether they sound like us.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I think the main thing is we have to love them, because it’s an awful lot of work putting records out, and we’re not trying to do it for money. We’re trying to do it because we feel it’s important to get music out into the world, and we want to help in that process. But it is a lot of work, so we need to love it. I guess we have a certain taste that is reflected in Heavenly and is reflected in all the bands on the label. So, I guess it’s not surprising, for example, that we’re not putting out Grime records. We just don’t like that stuff, and we don’t know anything about it. But beyond that, I think what we do is a reasonably broad church.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> That’s really cool. Something else that I’ve been curious about is that in past interviews, you guys have talked about how Heavenly, back in the \u201890s, was perceived differently in the US compared to the UK because K Records was seen as rougher and more punk compared to Sarah Records. Now that you’ve toured in once again in both the UK and the US, do you think that this difference in perception still exists now?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Less so, I think. If we’re thinking about the young people that come and see us, who are like 17 or 18 or really young, there isn\u2019t any difference because they’ve accessed it through a global system of distribution, so it doesn’t feel the same. When we started, our little worlds were so much more separate. It was kind of a big deal to go travel out to Olympia on the West Coast [of the US] and play with those people and meet those people, because you only knew them by their records, you didn’t know them as people. You wouldn’t have had a Zoom call like this. You might have maybe written some letters or occasionally done a phone call. So, it feels like the distances between those things, in all sorts of ways, was much, much greater. But it also meant that they grew up in a really interesting way, so they became, in the same way, [like] in Australia, [where] there’s weird animals that have evolved because they haven’t had the chance to mix with other less weird animals. I think that labels and scenes in those days were a bit more like that. Sarah was like a weird platypus, K Records was like some kind of strange wombat, and they just evolved according to their own environments. And then, we were lucky enough to be able to kind of go from one to the other, but it wasn’t that common.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I think also Heavenly is just known as Heavenly [now]. I think in the UK, we were the punkiest end of the Sarah scene, and probably on K, we were the twee-est end of the punk rock scene. We like being in both scenes, but people inherently saw us at least from the perspective of that scene. And now, obviously, there’s still some people that see us that way, but most people just see us as Heavenly.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Also, the other thing that’s happened is that both of those scenes or labels have become a lot bigger in retrospect than they were at the time. People talk a lot about Riot Grrrl and everything that was happening over there at that time, and people talk a lot about what Sarah records were up to, creating their own little environment, which was quite small. But both of those things have been\u2014 they haven’t quite become legends\u2014 but they’ve become iconic, and they’re talked about, and so they seem bigger now than they did then.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> That’s really interesting. I think Sarah Records was one of the first record labels that I got to know as a sort of \u201cOh, this is a very important record label\u201d thing, not from a specific band association, but rather just of itself. I used to talk on this online forum with a user who was really into the whole history of Sarah Records. Then, she later did this write-up, and it was all super cool. I feel like there’s definitely a lot of fandom dedicated to these old record labels that may not have been that big at the time, and I feel like there are definitely bands today that kind of carry the influence. Speaking of which, this is kind of more of a Tallulah Gosh question than a Heavenly question, but do you guys know about the band Good Flying Birds?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Yes. We’re playing with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> We are playing with them in Chicago.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> Oh, cool. Hell yeah. I didn’t even realize that. I didn’t look into the full [list of openers for the tour].<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> We got an added date [in Chicago], and I knew about them, so I asked them if they wanted to do the added date. As you might imagine, I didn’t realize what big fans they were of Tallulah Gosh when I asked them, but they said yes very quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> That’s really cool. Finally, I guess this is a bit of a random question to end it all off. In the process of doing research for this interview, I only just discovered the old B-side from Heavenly, \u201cEscort Crash on Marston Street.\u201d I want to ask a bit about that song because I find the idea of reworking an existing song about heartbreak into this rather more morbid song about a traffic accident to be really fascinating. What was the inspiration behind that one? Was there always worries on tour that the band may encounter accidents and unexpected events?<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Mathew wrote the words to that version. So, Amelia had written \u201cWish Me Gone\u201d, which is kind of a sad, drippy song, and Matthew, at the time, got quite impatient with the sad, drippy songs, so he didn’t like playing \u201cShallow\u201d very much and he didn’t like playing that one [Wish Me Gone] because they were slow and all a bit lachrymose. He thought he would write some alternative lyrics that we could play more like a punk song, which is what \u201cEscort Crash on Marston Street\u201d turned out to be. The theme is my driving because he thought I was gonna kill us all. I was the only one, I think, who could drive in those days, and somehow we fitted all in this little car.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> It was a Ford Escort. We lived on Marston Street.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> So he [Mathew] thought it’d be funny to do a song about how I killed the rest of the bands with my bad driving.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> But it’s actually an example of the process of [first writing] songs, and then lyrics, and then the lyrics affecting the song, because actually the song was a tune that we’d done at practice, and we’d played it obviously in a kind of quieter, more sad way. [During] Heavenly\u2019s first time around, I said already that I struggled to write lyrics. Sometimes I’d just give up and say, \u201cDoes anyone else want to write lyrics for this?\u201d So, Mathew wrote actually some of our best lyrics. I wrote a lot, Rob and Cathy occasionally wrote them as well, but it was kind of up for grabs. Anyone could write the lyrics to that song. In the meantime, I went away and wrote a lyric, and he went a wrote a lyric. And then we came back, and we actually said, \u201cWell, they clearly point in very different directions.\u201d So, we tried playing both of them, and then we had to decide which song we were gonna keep. Then we thought, let’s do [it] \u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Is that true?<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b>\u00a0 So, everything I said was untrue, but the true thing about what I said is that one of the tensions in Heavenly in those days was that Mathew and me really kind of wanted to be in a punk band and wanted to play fast and loud things, and Amelia quite often wanted to be in a sad pop band. Those two versions of that song are kind of a testament to that.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> I think actually, though, although in that particular case they went very different directions, that is kind of what made Heavenly, Heavenly. And in a way, also what made Tallulah Gosh, Tallulah Gosh, is [that] there was this desire to write kind of very poppy emotional songs, and then there was this desire to be the Ramones or something. Actually, it was the conflict there that I think made both bands kind of good.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> Yeah, I agree. I feel like what I love about both bands is how simultaneously intense and also catchy they can be. That is the end of my questions. Thank you so much for coming onto this interview.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Great pleasure.<\/span><\/p>\n

AF:<\/b> Nice to meet you.<\/span><\/p>\n

RP:<\/b> Look forward to seeing you soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

RS:<\/b> I look forward to seeing you guys live soon as well!<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This interview was edited for clarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Alison Wonderland Interview By Robin Sheng On April 13, I spoke with Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey of the indie pop band Heavenly. Formed in Oxford, UK, and known for their catchy and emotionally resonant works in the \u201890s, Heavenly has returned after a decades-long hiatus with a new album, \u201cHighway to Heavenly.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25732,"featured_media":53974,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,1523],"tags":[2705,2704,2707,2706],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53975,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53973\/revisions\/53975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}